Senator Batters: Senator Gold, one of the issues that I didn’t have time to deal with in my speech but I wanted to address — so I will ask for your comment on that — is when I spoke to judges about this, they said, “I guess the government must be trying to get at a better access to justice with this particular provision.” They didn’t really understand why else the government would be bringing this forward. But they said that if the government really wants to deal with access to justice in a significant way, the resources are not there, and it is hollow if they don’t provide the resources. Their impression was that it is much better to fix access-to-justice issues if the government fills judicial vacancies that exist right now to prevent court delays and also properly funds legal aid. What is your response to that?

Senator Batters: Thank you, Senator Lankin. I actually tried to deal with a few of those types of issues in my very speech, because I knew that might come up. Probably the main thing was, well, judges don’t have to agree to it; they can simply not agree to it.

My position on that, as I stated in my speech, is that, first of all, there may seem like no particular reason not to have a trial by video until it is actually going ahead. And it is only afterwards, as I’ve shown in those particular examples with the research that was done in those other countries, that we see the very dire circumstances that can result.

Also, sometimes, particularly with video, you freeze. You might be the accused sitting at your screen at home, and don’t even realize that you are not being well articulated, and you don’t even find out that a crucial part of your testimony has been missed until after the fact, and it is then too late.